For a few years I was ‘Head of DevOps’. Before I got that job title I’d done much the same work under other names, and since then I’ve watched the same work get called SRE, and then it seemed to morph towards platform engineering. If you’ve been in this industry for any length of time you’ll have seen titles come and go like this, and you might have wondered where they all came from.
So I (with the help of Mr Claude) built this family tree of software job titles, from the 1940s to now.
There are 104 titles, from ‘Computer’ (a person, not a machine) at the top to ‘AI Agent / Context Engineer’ at the bottom.
A solid arrow means the title grew out of its parent. A dashed arrow means influence, or a common career move. Landmark titles are in bold.
